Monday, July 17, 2023
You know those little libraries people have in their yards? Down the street from our old house (which is up the street from our new house), there is a little puzzle library. It is super cute – with a bunch of Tolkien quotes etched on it. We came across it a number of weeks ago and I took a puzzle home with me. It was a puzzle of wildlife stamps and I liked it very much, because it is a collection of small pictures that were easy to put together.
I am a terrible puzzler.
I have to go by color, and then the colors aren’t really very clear to me. I can NOT go by shape because I think EVERY piece looks like it will go with the one I am holding. EVERY piece. I got my borrowed puzzle together pretty quickly. When I went walking with Maren to return the puzzle, she picked the next one. It was candy. Candy is hard to say no to, because it is candy and candy is our friend. It looked like a hard puzzle. We went right home and started work on it. Maren is apparently a good puzzler, because she put together a big edge of a shelf and a bunch of a jar of candy. I moved pieces around. I touched pieces that would never go together together. I chatted. Maren went home. I continued touching pieces. Then I ran away from the puzzle.
The next day, I thought I would give it a whirl. I worked on the shelves. They were stripes of color. I gathered the appropriately colored pieces and touched each of them together until some went together. Keith came and looked at me. “Are you having fun?” he asked, already sure he knew the answer.
“No,” I said. “I cannot puzzle. Puzzles are too hard.”
He sat down and put ten pieces together. I did not know if that was a good thing or not. He suggested I just put it back in the box. I explained that once a puzzle is started, there is a commitment. You can’t just put. it. away.
I got some together (see the picture below. That is all I had together) and the 4th of July ladies came and did a TON. They left me with the hardest part – the tops of the jars that all looked the same. They actually believed I could get it together. I worked on it. I had to get it together before the next party four days later and I DID IT. It’s good thing I hadn’t started practicing walking yet, because there was certainly no time for both of those activities in a day!!
Today, I took Donna and Emma to return the super hard candy puzzle and to see the library. They were very happy to see such a wonderful addition to the neighborhood. We did not get another puzzle, because they were going home today. Donna thinks puzzles are for winter. They probably are. But easy ones can be for anytime.
We do a lot of puzzles (in the winter😊), and this one still looks hard to me. A few years ago, we chose a puzzle for its picture and then found that it had no interlocking pieces, just curves and angles that bumped up against each other. We worked it once, speaking to it severely (and creatively) many times during the process, and then gave it away as soon as we could. Congratulations on getting those jar tops done, and on getting that puzzle out of your house!
Curves and angles!!!! The horror! I can’t even! I’d just have them all bumped up next to each other…I am just laughing out loud thinking about it.